Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [14]
Michelangelo was a fitting Christian name for any child within the sphere of the Colonna family, defenders of the faith and warriors against heresy – but all the more so in the case of a child born not just on the saint’s name day, but on the eve of a great battle between Christian and Muslim in which the head of the Colonna family himself would take a leading role. When victory at the Battle of Lepanto followed within just over a week of his birth, the hopes and prayers attendant on his baptism were answered. Perhaps he was thought of as a child who had brought good luck. Perhaps that was another reason why, despite his difficult personality and frequent lapses into criminal behaviour, Costanza Colonna would always stand by him.
TOWN AND CITY
The artist’s early life was divided between the town of Caravaggio and the city of Milan. The contrast between the two could hardly have been greater. Set in the fertile plains of Lombardy, Caravaggio was a quiet place, architecturally undistinguished, which had once been a Roman outpost. The activities of the town revolved around agriculture, which was vital to the booming prosperity of the region. Since the later Middle Ages the entire area had been intensively developed. Irrigation channels, networks of stream and canal that still criss-cross the fields today, had been systematically introduced. Better understanding of crop rotation had transformed the area into a prime producer of cereals. Large plantations of mulberry trees were grown as feed for silkworms, silk being the essential raw material for Milan’s booming textile industry. The people of Caravaggio lived and worked by the rhythms of nature. They were known for their phlegmatic character, their solid business sense and their piety, the symbol of which was, from the 1580s onwards, the construction of the great shrine dedicated to Santa Maria della Fontana. Caravaggio was tranquil bordering on dull, a place where it felt as though nothing much had happened for a hundred years and more.
Milan, the great city, two hours’ ride away, had a population of 100,000, much the same as that of London or Paris at the time. Milan was noise and bustle, trade and industry, a populous and prosperous city – the place where Fermo Merisi, Caravaggio’s father, went to work each day with his mason’s tools of iron. It was a city known for the skill of its stone-workers and the ingenuity of its sword-makers. Milanese armour, Milanese swords and Milanese daggers were renowned as the finest in Italy. The men of the city were famous for their swordsmanship, a skill at which Caravaggio would come to excel.
The men of Milan were also known for their singular reluctance to marry. ‘In Italy marryage is indeede a yoke, and that not easy, but so grevious, as brethren no where better agreeing, yet contend among themselves to be free from marryage.’10 Distrust of matrimony was common enough in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, especially among the upper classes, to have provoked many such comments from visitors. Italian humanists, including Petrarch and Leonbattista Alberti, had railed against marriage as a distraction to the intellect and a potential cause of economic ruin. Nowhere was the misogynistic cult of celibacy stronger than in Lombardy. It did not necessarily entail sexual abstinence, merely a refusal to be yoked to any single woman. The rate of celibacy among the Milanese aristocracy reached unprecedentedly high levels in the second half of the seventeenth century, so much so that it has been calculated that more than fifty per cent of all high-born males in the city never married at all.11 Caravaggio would never marry either, although it is impossible to establish whether this was another example of the painter imitating aristocratic mores,